Travels of a Fish Nut

  “PM Heralds Vaccine Victory for Care Homes”, “Vaccine rollout to care homes complete”, “UK Breaks Vaccination Record with 600,000 Jabs in a Day”, “9M Jabs… On Our Way to a Great British Summer!” All front-page headlines from today's papers . All deservedly praising the amazing rate of vaccinations in the UK. But these papers are portraying this as a triumph for the government and for Johnson in particular. Yet this is not a triumph for the government, nor for Johnson, and we must not buy into the propaganda. Instead the success of the vaccine roll-out highlights just how badly Johnson and his government have fucked up at every step of this pandemic.   How, you ask?    Simply this:   The vaccine roll-out is not being run by the government, but by the NHS . It's their long-standing organisational and logistical skills that are being used to get this vaccine out to so many people so quickly. The government has (at last) taken a hands-off approach and left the exp...

This is, as the title says, a rant. I'm throwing any claims of objectivity, balance and calm out the window. I'm angry. In fact, I'm fucking furious. I'm furious about the way the government has responded to the coronavirus pandemic. And this isn't because I'm a liberal leftie who would be furious with anything a Conservative government does. The Australian right-wing government - currently headed by a man who once brought a lump of coal to parliament in a strange attempt at allying the concerns of opponents of fossil fuels, and who handled the bush fires so badly he was told to "piss off" by victims - has managed to successfully lead their country through the pandemic with only 102 deaths and around 7,000 cases out of a population of about 25 million. This isn't about Left vs Right, this is about Competent vs Incompetent. And our government has been incredibly incompetent. That's not just my opinion, statistics bear this out. We currently ha...

Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, made a speech today. The Telegraph had the scoop, and what they report suggests that Mr Smith has gone insane. The BBC article after the speech does little to change my mind.  The Telegraph reports that he believes that, ‘[t]he economy will never fully recover unless families on benefits return to work’

I recently had a health scare. I had 'flu which left me bed-ridden for a week. Just when I thought I was on the mend I developed a chest infection which resulted in me collapsing in the street unable to breath and being taken to hospital. It was one of the scariest moments of my life (which tells you how uneventful my life has been!). I was in a strange hospital, not knowing what was wrong with me, how long I'd be there, and, for the first time in my life, wondering how much it was going to cost me. . .

I've been away from this blog for a long time and it's strange to think about what's driven me back to it. It's not exciting adventures or silly mishaps or even cool fish. It's the government. Before I get going I should say I will be trying, if I can get momentum, to post more here and those posts will be better sourced than this one which is going to have no links, no references, nothing but the words that I need to get out right now. I hate this government. This government is destroying our country and everything that made it great. They're destroying the NHS by stealth. Privatising small portions so we won't notice until, like an infection, it's spread so far that removing it would kill the whole thing. They're destroying our schools. Allowing academies to flourish while cutting funding to local authorities and forcing struggling schools to be converted, whether the students, staff or parents want it or not. These academies don't have t...